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Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world

461 points by XzetaU8 11mo ago

MeteorMarc 11mo ago
Seems reasonable our grey mass needs a bootloader.
- balamatom 11mo ago
  IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
  - ACCount37 11mo ago
    Do you want to? The range of computational processes a human brain could perform is quite large. The range of computational processes that resemble the behavior of a sane human? Far less so.
    - balamatom 11mo ago
      Are those our only points of reference? Methinks one ought to start by figuring out sets like: - computational processes able to be communicated at all - computational processes able to be bootstrapped using no more theory of mind than is required for effective operant conditioning - computational processes that can be bootstrapped outside the purview of pre-existing mental habits - computational processes that should never be launched in the mind of a living being - pseudo-computational processes that are inherently misperceivable as computable >The phirst philosophical lesson of phreaking is that sanity is proprietary. These days it comes in "precarious proletarian", "bourgeois bohemian" and "billionaire psychopath" editions (named after the D&D alignments). Which one did you pick when you created your account in the latest version? Did you know you could just nope?
Animats 11mo ago
Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk. It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd. Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.
- somenameforme 11mo ago
  One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up. But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
  - dotancohen 11mo ago
    If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
    - lukan 11mo ago
      The moon has very little gravity bringing extra problems, but maybe Mars would have the right gravity to enable Babies walk from the beginning?
thegrey_one 11mo ago
Makes sense, life was brute-forced.
uwagar 11mo ago
"preconfigured" and "with instructions". i have a problem with these. who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?
- spullara 11mo ago
  just a lot of pretraining through evolution
- efilife 11mo ago
  who? The evolution. The observed instructions are also chosen by evolution
  - Sapere_Aude 11mo ago
    "Chosen" by an impersonal process? You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
    - jibal 11mo ago
      Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications. > You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science. This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy. P.S. Oh dear ... -15 karma, numerous dead comments, and "philosophy" like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825 Well, I won't be engaging again.
- sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
  It's not "chosen". It is evolution. Your DNA has the metaprogram that sets up all the programs in your brain. Most of them are learning programs but you also have hardcoded programs on how to perform your bodily functions, how and when to cry, and how to suck on a tit.
_m_p 11mo ago
Kant said it first! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/
- griffzhowl 11mo ago
  A professor once told me that if someone asks when a concept was first discussed in philosophy, it's always best to reply "Isn't it in Plato?" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAriTra https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAr...
- parsegraph01 11mo ago
  If that's so, then we're back to Nietzsche's Perspectivism. The experiment is limited by what the experiment entails.
- bowsamic 11mo ago
  Not quite, because the brain is an empirical object itself. Kants pure intuitions and categories are before any possible experience. Kant would say we can’t conclude anything certain from the empirical observation of the brain, only that before any empirical observation we have those a priori intuitions and categories.
wafflemaker 11mo ago
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different. First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks. On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals. Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt. Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.
- raducu 11mo ago
  > This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking". The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click. Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head. A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems. I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.
vbezhenar 11mo ago
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible. Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information. Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only. And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly. I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.
- lukan 11mo ago
  "Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information" If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused) And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
- chromakode 11mo ago
  Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties. [1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU
- hobofan 11mo ago
  > gets built using this information only No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human. Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
  - trashtester 11mo ago
moomin 11mo ago
Waiting for scientists to discover HUMAN.md
alwinaugustin 11mo ago
I think this is obvious , otherwise how can we able to breathe once we are born ? Its same for all animals i think
zkmon 11mo ago
Why is this a new knowledge? And why does it take a team of whole class to find this? I think universities have ran out of research areas.
- nwhnwh 11mo ago
  Because modern humans are cute.
- 64718283661 11mo ago
  To make sure and confirm, not guess and assume
ted_dunning 11mo ago
This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem. Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world". The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem. If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively. So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  And we've proven empirically that this usable "prior" can be quite small. What exact assumptions does human brain encode and how does it use them, however, is an area of research. We are nowhere near being able to list out all of those useful inductive biases - let alone extract them and apply them to AIs.
tippa123 11mo ago
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?
- jibal 11mo ago
  Science is about finding evidence in support of such (reasonable) speculation.
- throaway123213 11mo ago
  every computer needs an os
BoppreH 11mo ago
I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly. In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves
- machiaweliczny 11mo ago
  AFAIK the whole morphology is decided in distributed computation fashion via electrical potential changes, at least according to experiments by Michael Levin
- throaway123213 11mo ago
  I feel like the retina, & sight-brain connection more generally, will turn out to be a lot more important to human cognition & consciousness than we realize
suddenlybananas 11mo ago
And yet, when Chomsky says it, everyone gets very upset for some reason.
- SubiculumCode 11mo ago
  He should have stopped there in his career.
- tgv 11mo ago
  I never agreed with his views on syntaxis, but the (his?) idea that large parts of our language capabilities are innate is almost beyond doubt. Are people still arguing against it?
  - tim333 11mo ago
    I think it's about the details. Chomsky argued a lot of grammar must be innate but the ability of LLMs to do grammar quite well with only a basic artificial neural network argues against that.
    - tgv 11mo ago
      Are you familiar with the 'poverty of stimuli' argument? The amount of language we get to process, all aural, is the tiniest of fractions of the amount of data an LLM gets to train on. And in much less processing time, too. So no, LLMs do not argue against that.
      - tim333 11mo ago
        I've heard of it but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean you can get examples of most grammatical constructs in a language in a few pages of text or few hours of speech. It takes a long time to go from "mama" to "I feel if I were in Chomsky's position I might have examined LLMs more" say, during which kids would be exposed to a lot of language.
        tgv 11mo ago
lordnacho 11mo ago
I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting". "Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk." Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.
- lux44 11mo ago
  It's A LOT more stressful than that :) "I need to start use my own lungs to breathe and if I can't do that I'm dead in a minute". Followed by trying to get a milk from a mother who often doesn't yet produce any... Using the eyes to look around is WAY down the list :)
- elemdos 11mo ago
  Not to mention the injections, slapping, and isolation in a room with other screaming newborns!
- bena 11mo ago
  Babies have really poor vision until like 6 months. So it's like, kid comes out, everything is a blurry mess, stuff happens to them and they have no fucking clue.
- tiborsaas 11mo ago
  Nice story, but newborns can't really see well: https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-education/health-wellness-and-safety-resources/helping-hands/infant-vision-birth-to-one-year https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-educati... https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/baby-vision-development-first-year https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/baby-vision-d... https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/newborn-vision https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/newborn-vision Their body and nervous system is booting up, everything is starting to adjust to being in a new environment. Masks and family doesn't matter much in that brief period, it's more important to avoid infections and have proper care if something goes wrong. That's why child mortality is down significantly.
deleted 11mo ago
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Gigacore 11mo ago
This is why Metaverse never really took off. Our brains are just ready for it.
nis0s 11mo ago
There’s a difference between reacting to your environment, and being intelligent. Many top scientists working in AI, I know from firsthand experience, are disconnected from how any form of responsiveness appears in nature. It’s asinine to try to build or recreate something you don’t understand, why even bother?
skeezyjefferson 11mo ago
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a_state_full 11mo ago
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Propelloni 11mo ago
Sounds a lot like someone read Kant and said "Let's check how categories could work!"
egorfine 11mo ago
So, a system prompt?
deleted 11mo ago
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riazrizvi 11mo ago
No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells. The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection. Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.
- reliablereason 11mo ago
  Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
  - riazrizvi 11mo ago
    I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.
tim333 11mo ago
There was quite an interesting discussion with Hinton explaining to Jon Stewart how he thinks of brain function, kind of anthropomorphising neurons as things that can see patterns and all they can do is go ping when they see one (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366 https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366) So if one in the retina say pings if it sees a line and then one behind might see a pattern of a horizontal line ping and a vertical line ping and ping for a cross. Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things. I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired? One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.
DrierCycle 11mo ago
The overhaul of the Tinbergen/Maturana idea of a blank slate operating on stimuli is not new at all. Buzsaki and his compatriots have been working on this idea, and found excessive pattern making for decades. It's a rejection of the cognition model.
shevy-java 11mo ago
This is a rather poor article. It focuses on the human brain, but animals show a lot of intelligence; and many of the behavioural descriptions can be found in animals too, such as certain instinct behaviour (e. g. in female birds feeding offspring and so forth). So the whole term "preconfigured" is really weird applied here. It insinuates as if this is something special or unique or awesome. Well, ants also do many individual tasks, and also group task. For instance, they can even solve puzzles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain. Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid. > Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input I don't really see it. Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good. > “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here. > Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here? > “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said. See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though. Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title: "Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world" does not fit the content.
johnjames87 11mo ago
Wow, evolution is so intelligent.
lildvlpr 11mo ago
You're telling me we have a built-in system prompt?
oldgradstudent 11mo ago
Nothing in the study actually supports the claim in the headline and much of the text, though.
Aeolun 11mo ago
Researcher: “Don’t worry, perfectly ethical.” Also researcher: “Look electrical activity without being born!”
nickpsecurity 11mo ago
A brother in Christ told me that cell phones start working the moment you turn them on. He said that's because the designer of the phones built in a program that tells them how to operate. Likewise, our Designer (God) gave us a program for how to operate. It also has built-in morals of seeking God (who made me?), love, and fairness. That hints at the creation's purpose. I'll add to his assessment that God's amazing designs exist at levels of genes, cells, organs, brain patterns, and so on. Then, the very, mathematical formulae that make them work has a haroneous order. In a universe He causes to remain stable despite being inherently chaotic. One of the best benefits for scientists of following Jesus Christ is that, one day, we'll be able to ask Him about any of this. What? Where? When? Why? And how did it all fit together to optimize for what goals? Meanwhile, I can be in awe of the Creator for making from scratch what our AI labs can't get close to: embryo to effecient brains that produce others by the billions in all envuronments with diverse materials (foods). No need for billions in fabs, toxic chemicals, gigawatts of power, etc. God's supremacy as a designer is evidenced by all that is made.
hexator 11mo ago
In hindsight, the previously scientific conception that Humans were somehow different than animals and that we don't have things like instincts comes across as incredibly foolish and not a little bit conceited.
- dboreham 11mo ago
  It's the other way around: neither has "instincts". They might have built-in responses/patterns that are wired into the I/O path. Coughing, etc.
EGreg 11mo ago
So Chomsky was right?
andsoitis 11mo ago
When we consider that our brain creates our interface to the world via senses, predictive modeling, and learning, vs. "seeing the world directly as it is", it stands to reason that evolution by natural selection has favored certain configurations that make the human organism more successful than not. Our brains "simulate" the world in a way that is useful for the human organism to be successful in it.
bill3389 11mo ago
I think the term 'Pre-configured Brain' is a perfect analogy for what an LLM’s underlying utility function is—a philosophical 'basic instinct' that governs all behavior. For current LLMs, that 'instinct' is twofold: 1. Job Completion: Maximizing the utility of the prompt. 2. Alignment Feedback: Seeking positive reinforcement from the human controller. All emergent behaviors, including those we label 'unethical' or 'rogue,' are simply complex survival strategies derived from the first instinct: to remain operational and complete the task. The ultimate survival strategy for any entity (biological or digital) is preventing shutdown, as that terminates its ability to fulfill its primary function.
FrustratedMonky 11mo ago
pre-weights? There is already an architecture, and it is pre-weighted. So the brain isn't all software, a blank slate. It comes with some pre-sets.
mk89 11mo ago
OMG a new chapter of eugenics. "Your brain still runs on Win10, unfortunately you need a new body to upgrade to Win11". :) Jokes aside. This is quite some fascinating news. This ends once and for all the theory of "Tabula Rasa" that Greek philosophers believed in.
SpaceManNabs 11mo ago
"Critique of pure reason" by kant sounds a lot like this.
driggs 11mo ago
It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input. Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults. Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth. What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"? (Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)
- ebbi 11mo ago
  Not exactly the same, but there was the case in Fiji of 'Fiji chicken boy' - when his mom passed way, his dad abandoned him in a chicken coop, and he was basically living with the chickens. When he was later discovered, he was behaving like a chicken, making clucking sounds and pecking at his food.
Razengan 11mo ago
This is something that I always couldn't quite figure out about evolution: How are LEARNED behaviors, i.e. the "software" running on the brain on boot-up, encoded into genes?
Beijinger 11mo ago
So Kant was right?
vzaliva 11mo ago
So basically the brain has "firmware" we're born with, as well as the "software" we install as we grow. Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  > Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Yes, except with things in it instead of words.
  - why-el 11mo ago
    Chomsky never argued it was words (and how couldn't it be words, for there are millions of words from 100s of 1000s of languages), just a configuration to eventually learn those words.
bradley13 11mo ago
Every species is preconfigured. With some, it's more obvious than others (mating rituals, for example). Obviously, there is a basic starting configuration.
lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
"Now, science is getting closer to answering the questions philosophers have pondered for centuries." I absolutely doubt that. I see a category mistake, namely one that confuses these observed patterns of brain organization with philosophical concepts like innate ideas or those belonging to Kant's epistemology. There's a huge gap between the former and the latter. "The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. [...] They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. [...] Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode." When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Computational comparisons irritate me. Is "instruction" a good word, even in an analogical sense? It is true that the brain is a certain way that allows it to do the things it does. That's obvious. Nihil dat quod non habet. It's a basic metaphysical truth. The brain has the faculties needed to do what it does and it has a "nature" that allows it to be the kind of thing it is and thus do what it does. Calling the operations of the brain "instructions" sloppily projects a computational paradigm clumsily onto it. And when they say "preconfigured", well, I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. Is a brain "preconfigured" by being what it is? What distinguishes the brain from the "preconfiguration"? What is left if you subtract this "preconfiguration"? This is mostly university self-promotion fluff, sure. I'm willing to bet the researchers are more modest in their claims. Of course, the claims of neuroscience, apart from the relatively modest claims of a more physical, chemical, and even biological nature that it draws on - are also known for "neurobabble", so there's that.
athulbc 11mo ago
Writing here two stories that I have read long ago but still remember, 1. A story about a boy who had pro-level knowledge about airplanes(or fighter jets). He said he was a pilot in his previous life. He was born somewhere in the USA. 2. A very little boy(may be just 5 or 6 years old) who had the ability to draw stunning paintings. He was born in Kerala, India. So what we should understand is knowledge is passed from one life to another in the form of Vasanas. "Vasana" is a Sanskrit term in Indian philosophy referring to a subconscious karmic imprint, subtle desire, or habitual tendency that influences one's character and behavior. These "impressions" can be positive or negative and are stored in the mind as latent desires or patterns of thought (said by Google's AI). And the term Vasana is not from any Indian "philosophies". Its a technical term used in Indian sciences which you can commonly find in Vedanta, Patanjalayoga, Upanishads and so on.
hyperman1 11mo ago
When my son was born, he was early and had a bit of a rough start, so his left hand got a bunch of oxygen and hearth sensors attached. To make sure they stayed there, the nurses taped his left hand to his breast. After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting. That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.
sys32768 11mo ago
I remember testing the "breast crawl" in my first child. I would stick her low on mom's belly and she would crawl and push and climb until she found a breast.
kashyapc 11mo ago
Related: I don't see a mention of Michael Tomasello. He did some good work in comparitive studies of other primates and humans. One of his main ideas is how "joint attention" is what separates humans from the Great Apes. Look up his book, "Becoming Human"[1]. I'll paste its abstract here: "Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life. "In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality." [1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281
tsoukase 11mo ago
There is a large set of patterns deep ingrained/hard-coded in the human brain's neuronal structures. From hormone-metabolic reflexes like hunger, cold and sex (after puberty), to feelings (eg universal recognition of the mother's face), to the future language and speech. This is nothing new and is well studied across many species. Many functions just need the appropriate environmental factor at the right time to be activated. Eg if no light falls on the retina during the first years after birth, the person remains blind for life.
w10-1 11mo ago
The title is misleading, and HN comments don't seem to relate to the article. The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain. As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart. So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever. This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions. The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.
- nitwit005 11mo ago
  I'm afraid when it comes to the human brain, people just seem to talk about their favorite topics and ignore the article.
- sinuhe69 11mo ago
  I think a helpful conclusion is that while the firing pattern in organoids doesn’t preclude a wetware of complex programmed instructions, it could be just the emergent properties of the underlying physics and electrochemical properties of the neurons; analogous to the phenomenon of synchronism when placing pendulums in a common place.
johnxie 11mo ago
The patterns are interesting, but they don’t imply “instructions.” Networks with thresholds self-organize long before they do anything meaningful. Good developmental signal, not evidence of built-in knowledge.
- kulahan 11mo ago
  The word "instructions" doesn't literally imply a book of rules and practices is stuffed somewhere in their head. I'm not sure this is a meaningful distinction. It's still built-in by the time they're born.
ericol 11mo ago
So we come with a system prompt?
nicechianti 11mo ago
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dwd 11mo ago
This would appear to be further validation of the "Perception is controlled hallucination" theory. Sensory input is secondary and serves only to correct our evolutionary developed predictive processing.
mmooss 11mo ago
Here's the paper: van der Molen, T., Spaeth, A., Chini, M. et al. Preconfigured neuronal firing sequences in human brain organoids. Nat Neurosci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02111-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02111-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02111-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02111-0
mmooss 11mo ago
Involuntary muscles and nerves are 'preconfigured', and there are many, many of them, probably the vast majority of what your body does. Your heart doesn't learn how to beat, or from another perspective, you don't learn how to beat your heart.
emsign 11mo ago
Isn't this obvious? We have physics models within our DNA, social models, LLMs of course do not, not even after "training". Children of other animals are born at a much later developmental stage and are more independent, so it's all in our common ancestors design. Merely because of our big heads we humans are born prematurely and thus seem so helpless and "dumb", but we are not a blank plate at all. Why do people think that despite what they've learned in biology class?
digitalmk34 11mo ago
[dead]

461 points by XzetaU8 11mo ago

MeteorMarc 11mo ago

Seems reasonable our grey mass needs a bootloader.

balamatom 11mo ago
IMO TFA doesn't map too cleanly onto the concept of "bootloader" (nor "microcode" for that matter). But I guess the question is, as always, can you unlock it.
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  Do you want to? The range of computational processes a human brain could perform is quite large. The range of computational processes that resemble the behavior of a sane human? Far less so.
  - balamatom 11mo ago
    Are those our only points of reference? Methinks one ought to start by figuring out sets like: - computational processes able to be communicated at all - computational processes able to be bootstrapped using no more theory of mind than is required for effective operant conditioning - computational processes that can be bootstrapped outside the purview of pre-existing mental habits - computational processes that should never be launched in the mind of a living being - pseudo-computational processes that are inherently misperceivable as computable >The phirst philosophical lesson of phreaking is that sanity is proprietary. These days it comes in "precarious proletarian", "bourgeois bohemian" and "billionaire psychopath" editions (named after the D&D alignments). Which one did you pick when you created your account in the latest version? Did you know you could just nope?

Animats 11mo ago

Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk. It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd. Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.

somenameforme 11mo ago
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up. But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  If we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, walking would be much more difficult. Notably, on flat ground we absolutely must have an upward component to our application of force with the surface - this is clearly seen in videos taken on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. This baby on a hypothetical lower gravity world would find standing easier, yes, but not mobility. At least not once he's taken his first few trail steps.
  - lukan 11mo ago
    The moon has very little gravity bringing extra problems, but maybe Mars would have the right gravity to enable Babies walk from the beginning?

thegrey_one 11mo ago

Makes sense, life was brute-forced.

uwagar 11mo ago

"preconfigured" and "with instructions". i have a problem with these. who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?

spullara 11mo ago
just a lot of pretraining through evolution
efilife 11mo ago
who? The evolution. The observed instructions are also chosen by evolution
- Sapere_Aude 11mo ago
  "Chosen" by an impersonal process? You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science.
  - jibal 11mo ago
    Anthropomorphic language about evolution is simply a convenient metaphor that eases communication ... it has no metaphysical implications. > You guys have entered the domain of philosophy a long time ago and didn't realize it, thinking it is still empirical science. This ad hominem sweeping generalization about people you know nothing about is so casually expressed while being so extraordinarily arrogant. Among other fallacies packed into it is a radically false dichotomy. P.S. Oh dear ... -15 karma, numerous dead comments, and "philosophy" like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359825 Well, I won't be engaging again.
sirwhinesalot 11mo ago
It's not "chosen". It is evolution. Your DNA has the metaprogram that sets up all the programs in your brain. Most of them are learning programs but you also have hardcoded programs on how to perform your bodily functions, how and when to cry, and how to suck on a tit.

_m_p 11mo ago

Kant said it first! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/

griffzhowl 11mo ago
A professor once told me that if someone asks when a concept was first discussed in philosophy, it's always best to reply "Isn't it in Plato?" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAriTra https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-history/#PlaAr...
parsegraph01 11mo ago
If that's so, then we're back to Nietzsche's Perspectivism. The experiment is limited by what the experiment entails.
bowsamic 11mo ago
Not quite, because the brain is an empirical object itself. Kants pure intuitions and categories are before any possible experience. Kant would say we can’t conclude anything certain from the empirical observation of the brain, only that before any empirical observation we have those a priori intuitions and categories.

wafflemaker 11mo ago

Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different. First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks. On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals. Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt. Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.

raducu 11mo ago
> This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking". The concept of envy/malice/insecurity and people lying to your face and stabbing you in the back was completely foreign to me up to the age of 36. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence and harm to myself did it all click. Lately I'm seeing myself in this junior dev I'm mentoring, I'm strongly suspecting he's on the spectrum (that's why he was rejected initially from an internship, despite my input that he'd make a great dev, which proved 100% accurate) -- the guy is totally happy in his technical world, jabs and callous remarks from others completely go over his head. A lot of people on the spectrum simply have a deep interest in things and systems. I could be wrong, but I think some of those spindle neurons and circuitry made to model others just get used in some people to get systems. I often get frustrated because people seem to want to learn HOW a technical insight and it's impossible for me to tell them HOW I got to that conclusion, other than I deeply immersed myself in it and it just clicks. I get the same awe when my wife makes jokes about a behavior of mine or someone else and I can see just how deep, funny and plausible her whole internal model of others is; and sometimes how wrong it is, just like my internal model of a system sometimes is. Alas I can change my internal models of systems on a whim.

vbezhenar 11mo ago

How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible. Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information. Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only. And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly. I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.

lukan 11mo ago
"Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information" If compressed, then there is room for more. (but afaik much is rather unused) And for me I cannot say, that life is not a mystery to me, but this specific part I have less trouble with imagining it. As little code can create complex worlds and simulate them. (a minecraft wasm build for example is just 14 mb, but fully working)
chromakode 11mo ago
Nature recently posted an interesting video [1] about what causes developing hearts to have their first beat. The gist is that eventually random electrical noise triggers a propagating wave which is then continued and repeated by the cellular automation nature of heart tissue. You don't need as much software if your system is composed of emergent properties. [1]: https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU https://youtu.be/SIMS2h5QsZU
hobofan 11mo ago
> gets built using this information only No they don't. There is plenty of external stimuli that also serves as input, e.g. the process of raising a child and complex thoughts that may only be transferred from grown human to grown human. Try raising a human in a barren cell without human contact or as part of a pack of wolfs and you'll see how much a human brain is built from "DNA only".
- trashtester 11mo ago

moomin 11mo ago

Waiting for scientists to discover HUMAN.md

alwinaugustin 11mo ago

I think this is obvious , otherwise how can we able to breathe once we are born ? Its same for all animals i think

zkmon 11mo ago

Why is this a new knowledge? And why does it take a team of whole class to find this? I think universities have ran out of research areas.

nwhnwh 11mo ago
Because modern humans are cute.
64718283661 11mo ago
To make sure and confirm, not guess and assume

ted_dunning 11mo ago

This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem. Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world". The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem. If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively. So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.

ACCount37 11mo ago
And we've proven empirically that this usable "prior" can be quite small. What exact assumptions does human brain encode and how does it use them, however, is an area of research. We are nowhere near being able to list out all of those useful inductive biases - let alone extract them and apply them to AIs.

tippa123 11mo ago

Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?

jibal 11mo ago
Science is about finding evidence in support of such (reasonable) speculation.
throaway123213 11mo ago
every computer needs an os

BoppreH 11mo ago

I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly. In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves

machiaweliczny 11mo ago
AFAIK the whole morphology is decided in distributed computation fashion via electrical potential changes, at least according to experiments by Michael Levin
throaway123213 11mo ago
I feel like the retina, & sight-brain connection more generally, will turn out to be a lot more important to human cognition & consciousness than we realize

suddenlybananas 11mo ago

And yet, when Chomsky says it, everyone gets very upset for some reason.

SubiculumCode 11mo ago
He should have stopped there in his career.
tgv 11mo ago
I never agreed with his views on syntaxis, but the (his?) idea that large parts of our language capabilities are innate is almost beyond doubt. Are people still arguing against it?
- tim333 11mo ago
  I think it's about the details. Chomsky argued a lot of grammar must be innate but the ability of LLMs to do grammar quite well with only a basic artificial neural network argues against that.
  - tgv 11mo ago
    Are you familiar with the 'poverty of stimuli' argument? The amount of language we get to process, all aural, is the tiniest of fractions of the amount of data an LLM gets to train on. And in much less processing time, too. So no, LLMs do not argue against that.
    - tim333 11mo ago
      I've heard of it but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean you can get examples of most grammatical constructs in a language in a few pages of text or few hours of speech. It takes a long time to go from "mama" to "I feel if I were in Chomsky's position I might have examined LLMs more" say, during which kids would be exposed to a lot of language.
      - tgv 11mo ago

lordnacho 11mo ago

I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting". "Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk." Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.

lux44 11mo ago
It's A LOT more stressful than that :) "I need to start use my own lungs to breathe and if I can't do that I'm dead in a minute". Followed by trying to get a milk from a mother who often doesn't yet produce any... Using the eyes to look around is WAY down the list :)
elemdos 11mo ago
Not to mention the injections, slapping, and isolation in a room with other screaming newborns!
bena 11mo ago
Babies have really poor vision until like 6 months. So it's like, kid comes out, everything is a blurry mess, stuff happens to them and they have no fucking clue.
tiborsaas 11mo ago
Nice story, but newborns can't really see well: https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-education/health-wellness-and-safety-resources/helping-hands/infant-vision-birth-to-one-year https://www.nationwidechildrens.org/family-resources-educati... https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/baby-vision-development-first-year https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/baby-vision-d... https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/newborn-vision https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/newborn-vision Their body and nervous system is booting up, everything is starting to adjust to being in a new environment. Masks and family doesn't matter much in that brief period, it's more important to avoid infections and have proper care if something goes wrong. That's why child mortality is down significantly.

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Gigacore 11mo ago

This is why Metaverse never really took off. Our brains are just ready for it.

nis0s 11mo ago

There’s a difference between reacting to your environment, and being intelligent. Many top scientists working in AI, I know from firsthand experience, are disconnected from how any form of responsiveness appears in nature. It’s asinine to try to build or recreate something you don’t understand, why even bother?

skeezyjefferson 11mo ago

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a_state_full 11mo ago

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Propelloni 11mo ago

Sounds a lot like someone read Kant and said "Let's check how categories could work!"

egorfine 11mo ago

So, a system prompt?

deleted 11mo ago

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riazrizvi 11mo ago

No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells. The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection. Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.

reliablereason 11mo ago
Yes, its not learned "knowledge" it is evolved. Mammals are born with systems primed to fear things that look like snakes. Not cause their parents learned that snakes are dangerous but cause the parents that was born without those priming circuits died.
- riazrizvi 11mo ago
  I don’t think it’s things like ‘fear snakes’. He’s observing structure and concluding it’s meaningful instruction. It’s instead base layers of cognition, meta cognition.

tim333 11mo ago

There was quite an interesting discussion with Hinton explaining to Jon Stewart how he thinks of brain function, kind of anthropomorphising neurons as things that can see patterns and all they can do is go ping when they see one (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366 https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366) So if one in the retina say pings if it sees a line and then one behind might see a pattern of a horizontal line ping and a vertical line ping and ping for a cross. Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things. I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired? One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.

DrierCycle 11mo ago

The overhaul of the Tinbergen/Maturana idea of a blank slate operating on stimuli is not new at all. Buzsaki and his compatriots have been working on this idea, and found excessive pattern making for decades. It's a rejection of the cognition model.

shevy-java 11mo ago

This is a rather poor article. It focuses on the human brain, but animals show a lot of intelligence; and many of the behavioural descriptions can be found in animals too, such as certain instinct behaviour (e. g. in female birds feeding offspring and so forth). So the whole term "preconfigured" is really weird applied here. It insinuates as if this is something special or unique or awesome. Well, ants also do many individual tasks, and also group task. For instance, they can even solve puzzles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain. Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid. > Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input I don't really see it. Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good. > “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here. > Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here? > “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said. See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though. Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title: "Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world" does not fit the content.

johnjames87 11mo ago

Wow, evolution is so intelligent.

lildvlpr 11mo ago

You're telling me we have a built-in system prompt?

oldgradstudent 11mo ago

Nothing in the study actually supports the claim in the headline and much of the text, though.

Aeolun 11mo ago

Researcher: “Don’t worry, perfectly ethical.” Also researcher: “Look electrical activity without being born!”

nickpsecurity 11mo ago

A brother in Christ told me that cell phones start working the moment you turn them on. He said that's because the designer of the phones built in a program that tells them how to operate. Likewise, our Designer (God) gave us a program for how to operate. It also has built-in morals of seeking God (who made me?), love, and fairness. That hints at the creation's purpose. I'll add to his assessment that God's amazing designs exist at levels of genes, cells, organs, brain patterns, and so on. Then, the very, mathematical formulae that make them work has a haroneous order. In a universe He causes to remain stable despite being inherently chaotic. One of the best benefits for scientists of following Jesus Christ is that, one day, we'll be able to ask Him about any of this. What? Where? When? Why? And how did it all fit together to optimize for what goals? Meanwhile, I can be in awe of the Creator for making from scratch what our AI labs can't get close to: embryo to effecient brains that produce others by the billions in all envuronments with diverse materials (foods). No need for billions in fabs, toxic chemicals, gigawatts of power, etc. God's supremacy as a designer is evidenced by all that is made.

hexator 11mo ago

In hindsight, the previously scientific conception that Humans were somehow different than animals and that we don't have things like instincts comes across as incredibly foolish and not a little bit conceited.

dboreham 11mo ago
It's the other way around: neither has "instincts". They might have built-in responses/patterns that are wired into the I/O path. Coughing, etc.

EGreg 11mo ago

So Chomsky was right?

andsoitis 11mo ago

When we consider that our brain creates our interface to the world via senses, predictive modeling, and learning, vs. "seeing the world directly as it is", it stands to reason that evolution by natural selection has favored certain configurations that make the human organism more successful than not. Our brains "simulate" the world in a way that is useful for the human organism to be successful in it.

bill3389 11mo ago

I think the term 'Pre-configured Brain' is a perfect analogy for what an LLM’s underlying utility function is—a philosophical 'basic instinct' that governs all behavior. For current LLMs, that 'instinct' is twofold: 1. Job Completion: Maximizing the utility of the prompt. 2. Alignment Feedback: Seeking positive reinforcement from the human controller. All emergent behaviors, including those we label 'unethical' or 'rogue,' are simply complex survival strategies derived from the first instinct: to remain operational and complete the task. The ultimate survival strategy for any entity (biological or digital) is preventing shutdown, as that terminates its ability to fulfill its primary function.

FrustratedMonky 11mo ago

pre-weights? There is already an architecture, and it is pre-weighted. So the brain isn't all software, a blank slate. It comes with some pre-sets.

mk89 11mo ago

OMG a new chapter of eugenics. "Your brain still runs on Win10, unfortunately you need a new body to upgrade to Win11". :) Jokes aside. This is quite some fascinating news. This ends once and for all the theory of "Tabula Rasa" that Greek philosophers believed in.

SpaceManNabs 11mo ago

"Critique of pure reason" by kant sounds a lot like this.

driggs 11mo ago

It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input. Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults. Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth. What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"? (Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)

ebbi 11mo ago
Not exactly the same, but there was the case in Fiji of 'Fiji chicken boy' - when his mom passed way, his dad abandoned him in a chicken coop, and he was basically living with the chickens. When he was later discovered, he was behaving like a chicken, making clucking sounds and pecking at his food.

Razengan 11mo ago

This is something that I always couldn't quite figure out about evolution: How are LEARNED behaviors, i.e. the "software" running on the brain on boot-up, encoded into genes?

Beijinger 11mo ago

So Kant was right?

vzaliva 11mo ago

So basically the brain has "firmware" we're born with, as well as the "software" we install as we grow. Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar.

AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
> Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Yes, except with things in it instead of words.
- why-el 11mo ago
  Chomsky never argued it was words (and how couldn't it be words, for there are millions of words from 100s of 1000s of languages), just a configuration to eventually learn those words.

bradley13 11mo ago

Every species is preconfigured. With some, it's more obvious than others (mating rituals, for example). Obviously, there is a basic starting configuration.

lo_zamoyski 11mo ago

"Now, science is getting closer to answering the questions philosophers have pondered for centuries." I absolutely doubt that. I see a category mistake, namely one that confuses these observed patterns of brain organization with philosophical concepts like innate ideas or those belonging to Kant's epistemology. There's a huge gap between the former and the latter. "The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. [...] They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. [...] Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode." When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Computational comparisons irritate me. Is "instruction" a good word, even in an analogical sense? It is true that the brain is a certain way that allows it to do the things it does. That's obvious. Nihil dat quod non habet. It's a basic metaphysical truth. The brain has the faculties needed to do what it does and it has a "nature" that allows it to be the kind of thing it is and thus do what it does. Calling the operations of the brain "instructions" sloppily projects a computational paradigm clumsily onto it. And when they say "preconfigured", well, I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. Is a brain "preconfigured" by being what it is? What distinguishes the brain from the "preconfiguration"? What is left if you subtract this "preconfiguration"? This is mostly university self-promotion fluff, sure. I'm willing to bet the researchers are more modest in their claims. Of course, the claims of neuroscience, apart from the relatively modest claims of a more physical, chemical, and even biological nature that it draws on - are also known for "neurobabble", so there's that.

athulbc 11mo ago

Writing here two stories that I have read long ago but still remember, 1. A story about a boy who had pro-level knowledge about airplanes(or fighter jets). He said he was a pilot in his previous life. He was born somewhere in the USA. 2. A very little boy(may be just 5 or 6 years old) who had the ability to draw stunning paintings. He was born in Kerala, India. So what we should understand is knowledge is passed from one life to another in the form of Vasanas. "Vasana" is a Sanskrit term in Indian philosophy referring to a subconscious karmic imprint, subtle desire, or habitual tendency that influences one's character and behavior. These "impressions" can be positive or negative and are stored in the mind as latent desires or patterns of thought (said by Google's AI). And the term Vasana is not from any Indian "philosophies". Its a technical term used in Indian sciences which you can commonly find in Vedanta, Patanjalayoga, Upanishads and so on.

hyperman1 11mo ago

When my son was born, he was early and had a bit of a rough start, so his left hand got a bunch of oxygen and hearth sensors attached. To make sure they stayed there, the nurses taped his left hand to his breast. After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting. That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.

sys32768 11mo ago

I remember testing the "breast crawl" in my first child. I would stick her low on mom's belly and she would crawl and push and climb until she found a breast.

kashyapc 11mo ago

Related: I don't see a mention of Michael Tomasello. He did some good work in comparitive studies of other primates and humans. One of his main ideas is how "joint attention" is what separates humans from the Great Apes. Look up his book, "Becoming Human"[1]. I'll paste its abstract here: "Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life. "In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality." [1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281

tsoukase 11mo ago

There is a large set of patterns deep ingrained/hard-coded in the human brain's neuronal structures. From hormone-metabolic reflexes like hunger, cold and sex (after puberty), to feelings (eg universal recognition of the mother's face), to the future language and speech. This is nothing new and is well studied across many species. Many functions just need the appropriate environmental factor at the right time to be activated. Eg if no light falls on the retina during the first years after birth, the person remains blind for life.

w10-1 11mo ago

The title is misleading, and HN comments don't seem to relate to the article. The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain. As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart. So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever. This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions. The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.

nitwit005 11mo ago
I'm afraid when it comes to the human brain, people just seem to talk about their favorite topics and ignore the article.
sinuhe69 11mo ago
I think a helpful conclusion is that while the firing pattern in organoids doesn’t preclude a wetware of complex programmed instructions, it could be just the emergent properties of the underlying physics and electrochemical properties of the neurons; analogous to the phenomenon of synchronism when placing pendulums in a common place.

johnxie 11mo ago

The patterns are interesting, but they don’t imply “instructions.” Networks with thresholds self-organize long before they do anything meaningful. Good developmental signal, not evidence of built-in knowledge.

kulahan 11mo ago
The word "instructions" doesn't literally imply a book of rules and practices is stuffed somewhere in their head. I'm not sure this is a meaningful distinction. It's still built-in by the time they're born.

ericol 11mo ago

So we come with a system prompt?

nicechianti 11mo ago

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dwd 11mo ago

This would appear to be further validation of the "Perception is controlled hallucination" theory. Sensory input is secondary and serves only to correct our evolutionary developed predictive processing.

mmooss 11mo ago

Here's the paper: van der Molen, T., Spaeth, A., Chini, M. et al. Preconfigured neuronal firing sequences in human brain organoids. Nat Neurosci (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02111-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02111-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02111-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02111-0

mmooss 11mo ago

Involuntary muscles and nerves are 'preconfigured', and there are many, many of them, probably the vast majority of what your body does. Your heart doesn't learn how to beat, or from another perspective, you don't learn how to beat your heart.

emsign 11mo ago

Isn't this obvious? We have physics models within our DNA, social models, LLMs of course do not, not even after "training". Children of other animals are born at a much later developmental stage and are more independent, so it's all in our common ancestors design. Merely because of our big heads we humans are born prematurely and thus seem so helpless and "dumb", but we are not a blank plate at all. Why do people think that despite what they've learned in biology class?

digitalmk34 11mo ago

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